Multi-attribute evaluation and selection of sites for agricultural product warehouses based on an Analytic Hierarchy Process

•Methodological multi-criteria/attribute approach for agri-food warehouses location.•Analysis of criteria and attributes, assignment, and assessment of importance levels.•Development of the agribusiness location model based on Analytic Hierarchy Process.•A real case study for a banana distribution w...

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Bibliographic Details
Published in:Computers and electronics in agriculture 2014-01, Vol.100, p.60-69
Main Authors: García, J.L., Alvarado, A., Blanco, J., Jiménez, E., Maldonado, A.A., Cortés, G.
Format: Article
Language:English
Subjects:
Accessibility
Agricultural economics
Agronomy. Soil science and plant productions
Analytic Hierarchy Process
Assessments
Biological and medical sciences
Cost analysis
Criteria
Fundamental and applied biological sciences. Psychology
Generalities. Biometrics, experimentation. Remote sensing
Multi-criteria and Multi-attribute methods in agribusiness
Position (location)
Proposals
Site selection
Site selection attributes
Site selection problem
Warehouses
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Summary:•Methodological multi-criteria/attribute approach for agri-food warehouses location.•Analysis of criteria and attributes, assignment, and assessment of importance levels.•Development of the agribusiness location model based on Analytic Hierarchy Process.•A real case study for a banana distribution warehouse exemplifies the methodology. Site selection for companies is a complex and unstructured problem that must be analyzed carefully and properly, since a localization error could drive to bankrupt. This problem has been discussed widely and effectively using multi-attribute methods in a manufacturing context, but it has been little studied in agribusiness. The goal of this work is a methodological approach oriented to evaluate optimal locations of new agri-food warehouses. Furthermore, a literature review is developed, analyzing the location problem and the attributes and techniques most widely used applied to agribusiness, and a case-study is presented in order to exemplify the methodological proposal. The multi-attribute technique called Analytic Hierarchy Process has been selected as the basis for the research, and it is applied to the real case study analyzed: the selection of a site for a new banana distribution warehouse. Six generic criteria have been analyzed: accessibility to the area, distance, cost, security of the region, local acceptance of the company, and its needs. The process includes the assignment of attributes to each one of the generic criteria, as well as the assessment of their importance levels. Three different areas of Guadalajara, Jalisco, and Mexico DF have been evaluated for the case-study, and the methodological proposal has been utilized to determine the best option.
ISSN:0168-1699
1872-7107
DOI:10.1016/j.compag.2013.10.009